LOVE AND POTATO SALAD

A novel of unrequited love and rhetorical fireworks in the Midwest.

The story, told by a garrulous and interrupting narrator known only as Chip, takes place in the college town of Iowa City, Iowa, and begins at the Jones family barbecue, where a group of friends and family are assembled by the tables of food, some awaiting the arrival of beautiful young Sally Jones. One of these men is a character the narrator repeatedly tells us he’ll refer to as Sparky T. Ganja, an “undeniably stupid” figure, “jowly, asthmatic, overweight, middle-aged,” who is smitten with Sally and is hoping to meet her at the barbecue. The narrator informs readers that Sparky and Sally met just a little while ago in Iowa City’s pedestrian mall one morning when the giant chicken costume Sparky was wearing (for his job at the Crusty Chicken) became stuck on a bench. Sally rescued him, and he fell instantly in love. But subsequently, at the barbecue, she innocently confesses that she’s smitten with another man, stopping only to remind Sparky that he’s deathly allergic to potato salad (“My rib cage would shatter like plate glass,” Sparky tells other barbecue-goers, “my testicles would shoot out of my nose, my heart would be jettisoned into the air, and my head would explode, sending forth a rain of carnage over Iowa City”). Smith writes the ensuing story with an enormous amount of very self-conscious gusto; single sentences curl on for whole paragraphs, and a few of the book’s hundreds of jokes actually land. But no amount of gonzo literary hijinks can counteract the fact that about 100 pages later, all the characters are still talking about potato salad. The wry, baroque phrasings and elaborations about nothing give the reader the dreary feeling of being trapped on the outside of a very long in-joke.

An extremely talky, allergy-obsessed novel impressed with its own wackiness.